The tone from the White House was sober second thought, as the giddy afterglow of electoral triumph gave way to gazing at the fiscal cliff.

The tone from the Republican-controlled House of Representatives was dulcet, for a change: We’re still here but this time we’ll play nice if you do, was House Speaker John Boehner’s carefully scripted line.

But the most interesting tones sounded more like squeals, as the devastated constituencies of American conservatism recoiled at the impossible reality of defeat.

There was arch-right talk radio superstar Rush Limbaugh, wailing like a wolverine in a bear-trap, wondering how best to chew his own leg off.

Maybe it was Sandy, said Limbaugh: “If a hurricane can literally end a presidential campaign . . . if we’re dealing with an electorate that can be moved by something genuinely as meaningless in substantive terms as that, then we’re living in the brave new world.

“We have to face some reality . . . this was not a glitch. This is the trend. We are outnumbered, whether you want to put it in terms of whether we lost the country or not.”

Sarah Palin popped up on Facebook, ringing the bells of media bias and Team Romney’s failure to fight hard enough for blue-collar American votes. Take heart in healing words, said Palin as we embark on the “wild ride” of watching Obama’s socialist policies outsource and destroy opportunity.

Palin cited 2 Corinthians 4:8: “We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed.”

Donald Trump rounded out a bloviating trinity, reduced to bully taunts after being caught out late on election night with a hysterical call for “revolution” against Obama.

It was NBC’s Brian Williams who excoriated Trump for his wafer-thin commitment to democracy, saying that the real estate mogul had “driven well past the last exit to relevance and veered into something irresponsible.”

Some of us wrote about the existential GOP crisis ahead of Tuesday’s vote. But now that it’s here, the sheer decibel level suggests the confused writhing will be painful and prolonged.

The clown car crashed, the survivors lost in a darkened ideological cul-de-sac, flashlight batteries failing. A bit early to be making bets on which brand of conservatism will rise from the wreckage.

But rise it will. Even if it has barely begun digesting the many ways the party misread the changing face of America (the DailyKos calculates it as 38 major mistakes), the American right is certain to return with something that more closely matches the 21st century.

Newt Gingrich, who went full mea culpa on CNN Wednesday, saying, “I was wrong,” made clear it will be next-generation conservatives who lead the way. But whatever outreach the party conjures has to be more than token, he warned.

“I think you can build a program that is very appealing and very inclusive,” Gingrich said. “The difference between outreach and inclusion is, outreach is when five white guys have a meeting and call you. Inclusion is when you are in the meeting.”

There will be plenty of intramural screaming along the way. The smart, well-reasoned fiscal conservatives doing battle with the Godly evangelicals; the legion of young libertarians who were shunned and silenced by old guard of all stripes at the Republican National Convention in Tampa; and the dwindling Tea Party faction.

In the meantime, the country might do well to mind the nativists who are likely to have none of it, no matter what, as long as Obama remains commander-in-chief.

The huge swath of mostly rural, mostly white southerners who voted for Romney on Tuesday includes everybody listed above. But it also includes fellow travellers such as Hank Williams Jr., who famously lost his Monday Night Football opening slot for likening the president to Adolf Hitler.

Williams hasn’t made a sound since Tuesday night, despite much triumphal taunting from tub-thumbing Democrats. One message on Twitter read, “I’d hate to be Hank Williams Jr.’s dog tonight.”

The noisy ones will work things out, eventually, and come up with an offer to Americans that says yes more than no.